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Oct 17, 2019

Solar Temple Massacre: Mystery endures 25 years later

Police carry bodies out of a farm in Cheiry, Switzerland where 23 cultists died in a mass murder-suicide.
Brad Hunter
Toronto Sun
October 5, 2019

The cult members thought the baby boy was the anti-Christ.

Emmanuel Dutoit was three months old and this tragic child was stabbed repeatedly. His killers used a wooden stake.

That was October 1994.

In a matter of days it would become clear to cops in Quebec and Switzerland the slain baby was the first salvo in the war for control of the Order of the Solar Temple cult.

Several days later in two quiet Swiss villages, 13 cult members enjoyed a last supper, then killed themselves by poison.

By the time the carnage was finished, 53 cult members were dead by poison, bullets or smothering. Eleven of the dead were Canadians.

***

The Order of the Solar Temple was a secret society that took their cues from the Knights Templar.

Frenchmen Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro founded the cult in the late 1970s or early 1980s in Geneva, Switzerland.

The sect’s beliefs were the usual gumbo of aliens and the godly. For example, they believed in the spiritual over the secular and preparing for the return of Jesus Christ as a “solar-god king.”

In addition, they wanted to unite the world’s great religions under the umbrella of the Solar Temple.

According to the Montreal Gazette, the cult planted roots in Quebec in the mid-80s.

There, they allegedly threatened a number of Quebec MNAs and were suspected of bombing Hydro Quebec transmission towers and plotting to obliterate Indigenous reserves.

For cops and residents, the chilling aspect was that the dead found in Quebec didn’t look like cult members.

“It came as a real shocker,” one relative of the dead told The Gazette. “It wasn’t written on their faces: ‘Hey, I’m a sect member.’”

***

Cult leader Luc Jouret preached doomsday and hellfire.

The 46-year-old was a homeopath who had been born in Africa and had lived in Belgium and Canada before establishing the Order of the Solar Temple.

And he brainwashed his wealthy followers with a chilling ease.

“They saw themselves as superior human beings whose survival was needed to ‘relaunch’ the human race after a cataclysm they saw coming because of the deterioration in world affairs,” Montreal Crown prosecutor Jean-Claude Boyer told The Canadian Press in 1994.

Jouret himself had the air of a “gentleman,” Boyer added, saying other members “looked like businessmen, there was nothing crazy about them.”

But one former member whose ex-hubby fell under the guru’s dark spell said the cult was only really about taking money from rich rubes.

Rose-Marie Klaus said she and her hubby were burned for about $500,000 in an organic farm scheme near Trois Rivieres. Others lost millions.

“Jouret thinks he’s Christ,” Klaus said in 1993.

“He told people that a great cataclysm is going to take place and that only the chosen will survive,” she said, adding a number of people relocated from Europe to Quebec to wait for the end.

***

By the early 90s, there was trouble in brain-scrambled paradise.

Jouret’s increasing doomsday vision and alleged messiah complex was causing friction inside the sect.

Some believed a significant amount of money was involved given the horde of cash the cult had shaken loose from wealthy members.

Cult kingpin Jouret apparently split off with his own group of followers after being ousted in favour of grand master Robert Falardeau.

The stage was set for mass suicide — and murder.

***

On Sept. 30, 1994 cops believe cult members Antonio Dutoit, his wife Nicky Robinson and their three-month-old son Emmanuel were stabbed to death in Morin Heights, Quebec.

Four days later, their chalet was found ablaze. Inside were their charred bodies. Swiss citizens Jerry and Colette Genoud were found dead at a nearby chalet.

Detectives believe the killers were cult members Joel Egger and Dominique Bellaton who flew from Montreal to Geneva in the wake of the murders.

But there was more horror to come.

On Oct. 5, 1994, in the tiny Swiss village of Cheiry, firefighters were called to a raging blaze at a farmhouse.

When it was cleared they discovered a horror show — bodies all over the place.

Twenty-three to be exact.

All were wearing ceremonial robes. Most had been shot in the head.

“It was frightful to enter a place like that and find so many dead,” Swiss police spokesman Beat Karten told reporters. “It’s atrocious. Atrocious.”

Among the dead were the mayor of Richelieu, Quebec Robert Ostiguy, his wife Francoise, Le Journal de Quebec reporter Jocelyn Grandmaison and Falardeau, a civil servant.

Less than an hour later and about 160 km away, 25 more bodies were discovered in two smouldering chalets. Among the dead was Jouret.

So what happened?

The European branch didn’t want to send money to Quebec anymore.

Cops came to believe the bloodbath was a purge of threats to Jouret’s leadership. They never believed Falardeau and the others would willingly kill themselves.

One widower of the slaughter pointed the finger at Jouret.

“Wherever Jouret goes, s— follows,” the man told The Gazette.

bhunter@postmedia.com

https://torontosun.com/news/world/solar-temple-massacre-mystery-endures-25-years-later

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